Search Party: Google's dominance in internet search declines as app search rises and AI threats

Gautam Mehra doesn't use any social media platform. “Google Discover is my equivalent of Instagram's Explore tab,” he says. “Google Discover is a personalized content feed that suggests articles and news based on a user's interests and search history. Lately, his Google Discover feed has displayed headlines like “Google's dominance in global search advertising market under threat: WARC,” “TikTok challenges Google, quietly rolls out image search feature in TikTok Shop,” and “Gen Z abandons Google, turns to Reddit for product research.” Strengthen your enterprise journey with strategic skills courses University courses Websites Visit Indian School of BusinessISB Chief Digital OfficerVisit University of Western AustraliaUWA Global MBAVisit Indian School of BusinessISB Chief Technology OfficerVisit Mehra, co-founder of advertising analytics platform ProfitWheel, is not surprised. For the rest, he uses platforms like Amazon for product research, Reddit for special issues, and ChatGPT, a food and grocery app. After 20 years as the undisputed king of internet search, Google's dominance has declined over the past 3-4 years with the rise of specialized platforms like Amazon for product search, Spotify/Apple Music for music, Roblox for gaming, Booking.com for travel, and TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, etc. for social media apps.

According to a March 2023 report from ratings improvement consultancy PowerReviews, 50% of U.S. consumers, mostly millennials, start their product search on Amazon instead of Google, and 5% of U.S. Gen Z users are more likely to start their shopping journey on social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram.

Over the past seven years, search's contribution to Google's overall advertising revenue has fluctuated. It dropped from 73.97% in 2017 to 70.8% in 2020. It rose slightly to 73.6% in 2023, but is still below 2017 levels. In April 2023, a WARC report predicted that Google's share of the global search advertising market will fall from 51% in 2021 to 50.4% in 2023. How did this happen? Basically, these days, you only turn to Google if you don't know where to look for something. Otherwise, you turn to specialized platforms, which Himanshu Khanna calls mindshare platforms. Khanna is the founder of Openvy.com, an online community platform. He points out that Google acknowledges that it is losing some of its search market share to platforms that monopolize user attention for certain activities.

Users go to IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes for movie reviews and ratings, and as a result, Google is now prioritizing those results and displaying them more prominently at the top of the search page, he said.Last week, some X users shared that Google has started showing Instagram posts within the Perspectives feature in search results.

But these mindshare platforms are trying to surpass Google's search capabilities. Today, when it comes to finding where you can watch something, Google is often the go-to option. Khanna says IMDb started surfacing this information, and now it provides details on where a show or movie is available in your country. Mehra, who has followed the history of Google search from the beginning, looks back on the changes that have taken place over the decades.

Archie was the first Internet search engine. It was created by Alan Emtage in 1990 to index information in the form of large files on the web. By 1994, Yahoo!, WebCrawler, and Lycos had expanded the search landscape. Google was officially launched in 1998. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin introduced the PageRank algorithm to Google's web search, which ranks web pages based on multiple factors and displays search results accordingly. Recalling the days when people browsed the web through dial-up connections and prayed that no one would reach their landline and interrupt their surfing, Mehra says it revolutionized modern internet search. In 2007, Google introduced Unified Search.

The 10 blue links led to images, news and videos appearing as part of the search results.Two years later, Microsoft launched rival Bing, but it remained a smaller player.

The early 2010s saw the rise of mobile and voice-based queries. Voice assistants like Siri and Alexa emerged, as did image-driven search. In 2020 and beyond, search has evolved into a personalized, AI-driven experience.

Aditya Agrawal, founder of superU, an advertising network for the AI ​​world, says that search engines will soon be replaced by search assistants. He cites a Gartner report that predicts that traditional search engine volumes will fall 25% by 2026 and that search marketing will lose market share to AI chatbots and other virtual agents.

The shift is underway: Last week, Amazon Beauty rolled out a personalized recommendation tool called Skin Care Advisor, and Agrawal is building a search assistant that will sift through data online, particularly in areas like health care.

What does this mean for Google? Mehra says that while Google's search influence may have waned a bit, the company still collects a ton of user behavior data from Gmail, e-commerce transactions and travel itinerary invoices. He adds that YouTube, Android and Chrome are all huge sources of data signals for sign-in data. Plus, Google's Pixel is introducing AI-powered features like Circle, which searches for things on the screen without switching apps. “I'm not selling my Google shares anytime soon,” says Mehra, who recently launched consumr.ai, an AI-driven consumer intelligence platform.

A Google spokesperson told ET in an email: “For the past 25 years, we've continued to reimagine and expand what's possible with Google Search. A few years ago, it might have seemed like science fiction to pull out your phone, take a picture of a broken bike part, and ask, 'How do I fix this?' Today, you can use Google Lens to find out what's broken, where to get a replacement part, and how to fix it yourself, all in seconds.” The spokesperson also pointed to Multisearch (which lets you naturally search for hard-to-describe things using photos and text) and Circle to Search as examples of the company's recent advancements in search.

Notably, Google's rivals' search interfaces fall short. Vikrama Dhiman, SVP of product at the on-demand technology conglomerate, says the infinite scroll feature on platforms like Instagram and TikTok has a negative impact on search functionality. These platforms are great at showing strong recommendations and keeping users scrolling, but asking direct questions reveals their limitations, he says. For example, Instagram offers a variety of recommended audio options for stories and posts, but searching for specific locations or music on the app is still cumbersome, Dhiman says. Impact on people How is the evolution of online search impacting the end consumer? People now expect platforms to understand the context of their searches. People want the search process to reduce the cognitive load of decision-making in as many aspects of their lives as possible, says superU's Agrawal.

So platforms are now trying to eliminate the need for search: food and grocery delivery apps display your most-visited restaurants, favorite dishes, previously purchased groceries, etc. at the top of their homepages.

This is done to reduce decision-making time on these apps, says Riti Malhotra, director of product at a hyperlocal delivery company. She recalls an inside joke from her days working at a food-delivery startup: the time it takes to decide what to order is longer than it takes to deliver it. But personalized search results have their limits: Even if an item is rarely purchased or has a low ranking, if it was the last thing you bought, it will be marked as previously purchased and displayed at the top until the model learns that it's an item the user no longer wants.

To some extent, these recommendation engines have made us accustomed to letting machines make decisions for us. Agrawal admits that now he only decides 5-10% of the time what food to order; the rest of the time, he relies on app recommendations. How do we use the time we save by not making these low-risk decisions?

Maybe we're looking at Instagram reels, he jokes. There are concerns about social media-driven search. Grocery and food recommendations are based on what the algorithm knows about you, so they don't force you to change your choices, says anthropologist Gayatri Sapru, founder of brand consultancy Folk Frequency. But platforms that don't have built-in search, like Instagram, are intuitively used for search, she adds. Instagram doesn't always have what you need, so it shows you the closest thing on offer, drawing your attention in another direction and limiting your worldview.

To back up his argument, Supple quotes American sociologist and MIT professor Sherry Turkle. Turkle writes that the mere existence of multiple windows on a screen forces us to absorb different information and parts of ourselves, diversifying our sources of information and showing us that our identity is a tapestry of ideas from different perspectives. This important skill is lost as we live, like, and scroll within apps that create our own worlds, Supple says, which is hindering the basic research skills of younger generations.

On a broader level, Supple warns that AI's tendency to prioritize quantifiable results could lead to more esoteric or indigenous ideas being overshadowed: Over time, AI could create a world in which the latter ideas disappear entirely from search results, which would be alarming.

Now more than ever, end users need to provide feedback to these apps to help them improve, says Roopa Rao, a product management professional whose experience in search adoption dates back to the days of Boolean search, when phrases like And, Or and Not were used to narrow search results. Tools like ChatGPT constantly ask if their response is helpful.

Without feedback, the AI ​​will assume that's what the user wants, she explains.Mehra also believes that while platforms continue to evolve their search features, individuals also need to reflect on how their search habits have changed over time and how they feel about those changes. “Less searching means less thinking,” Mehra describes himself.

Sources 1/ https://Google.com/ 2/ https://m.economictimes.com/news/company/corporate-trends/search-party-googles-dominance-in-internet-search-wanes-amid-rising-app-queries-and-ai-threats/articleshow/111367656.cms The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article

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